09 December 2011

We’re just a few days shy of three months since Microsoft first announced the new Team Foundation Service (a.k.a. TFS Azure) at this year’s //build/ conference. Since that time, Microsoft has updated this service over a dozen times – mostly to address bugs. Yesterday, the service received a major update that directly impacts how the service looks and acts.
A high-level look at some of the new features includes:

Improved navigation (really glad to see this).

Homepages with more/better information allowing you to see a project’s overall status at a glance.

Simplified UI for project “teams of one” – i.e. if you’re a one-person team, then various team-related features in the UI will be collapsed so they are out of the way.

E-mail notifications – there’s a UI for setting up quick-n-simple alerts as well as an advanced UI that provides capabilities above and beyond what’s available in TFS 2010 today.

Forecast Lines – this is a really neat feature that displays a line between work items in your product backlog based on where iterations are projected to fall (based on your current estimates and team velocity). This feature can easily be turned off if it’s not something you care for.

Improved Task Board editing – updating the Remaining Work and Assigned To fields can now be done directly on the “card” displayed on the task board – i.e. you do not have to open the work item to update these fields.

For the full details behind the above highlights, check out the following links:

If you would like to try out the Team Foundation Service, you can sign up at tfspreview.com. At the moment, the preview program is full but you can submit your e-mail address to get on the waiting list. Also, Brian Harry mentioned (in the post linked above) that he plans on posting a registration code sometime today (December 9th, 2011) that would allow a limited number of new registrations. Keep an eye out on his blog if you’re interested.